Dialysis center owner knows exactly what her patients are feeling

Dialysis center owner knows exactly what her patients are feeling

Published: Sunday, February 28, 2010

By Ed Stannard, Metro Editor

ORANGE — When Dawn Lawlor greets patients at her new dialysis center, she’ll know how they feel.

In fact, kidney disease is a part of her family history, so operating the new Liberty Dialysis center on Indian River Road is not just about opening a new business for her — it’s personal.

Both Lawlor and her late father, William Keating, had polycystic kidney disease. Her father underwent dialysis in the 1960s and ’70s, when it was a much more drawn-out procedure, lasting six to eight hours at a time. Lawlor used to hang out with him while he sat in the chair.

She has had two kidney transplants herself, the second one donated by her sister, and underwent dialysis for eight months after her body rejected the first transplant.

“It’s going to be important when a new patient comes to take the time to sit with them,” she says. “I’ll be here to greet every new patient that comes through the door … I want to know every one of them. I want to know what their needs are, what their concerns are.”

Lawlor knows her dad would be proud of her. He appreciated the care he received from the nurses in the dialysis unit at Danbury Hospital, and wanted her to go into the field.

“The care was very personalized, of course, and it was a really special relationship between the patient and the nurse.

“So as I got older, that was his thing. He would always say, ‘My dream for you is to be a dialysis nurse someday and to be for other patients what these nurses have been for me,’” Lawlor said.

She has finally fulfilled that dream, which has been hers as well as her father’s, but at 46, Lawlor has taken a long road to get there. At first she didn’t go into nursing. She worked in food service at the Ridgewood Country Club; married her husband, Eric; had her son, Garrett, in 1993; and dealt with her own disease before becoming a nurse in 1999 at Waterbury Hospital.

“November of that year was when I really got sick and I had to stop working,” she says.

PKD is a genetic disease in which multiple cysts develop in the kidneys. The symptoms include fatigue, loss of appetite, confusion and nausea.

“I didn’t start to fail until I was in my early 30s … My dad was the same age, so I kind of knew it was coming,” Lawlor says. Her son tested negative as a baby but she hasn’t had him tested again.

“If he does have it, there’s really nothing that they can really do about it,” she says. “I don’t want him to have that in the back of his mind. … I’m hoping it’s run its course in our family.”

After her first transplant, she went back to work, in charge of organ procurement at Hartford Hospital. “Donation is the other part of my passion,” she says.

Last week, Lawlor was doing last-minute tasks at the new center, which she hopes will be ready to open in mid-March. Chairs were draped in plastic, the nurses’ station was not quite put together and there was no furniture in the waiting room — although a fireplace and TV monitor had been installed. TV screens were also set up above each of the 15 stations.

There will be laptops available for patients and movies from Netflix.

Those are the little touches that Lawlor believes will make her patients more comfortable. “It’s all of the things that make people come here and say it’s almost like being at home.”

But Lawlor also knows the most important thing will be the personal touch, and she’ll make sure her staff of seven cares for each patient as if they know what the patients are going through.

The nurse in charge certainly does.

Contact Ed Stannard at 203-789-5743 or estannard@newhavenregister.com.

http://www.nhregister.com/articles/2010/02/28/metro/doc4b8a52198bebf063545593.txt